FIVE

By the time I reached the highway, however, my panic was gone. If many a night of drinking had on many a bad morning brought me close to committing myself (so little could I remember of what I had done) it now seemed to me that since the evening at The Widow’s Walk I had not—despite my agitation—been cut off again from my memory. If this was true, then I did not remove that blonde head from the burrow. Someone else was involved with the deed. It was even likely that the murder had not been my act.

Of course, how could I swear that I had stayed in bed each night? On the other hand, no one had ever accused me of walking in my sleep. Like the rustle along the beach that comes with the turning of the tide (if you have ears to hear it) so did a kind of confidence begin to return to me, a belief, if you could so call it, that I had not lost the last of my luck (just the sort of recovered faith that gets a man back to the crap tables).

In my case it was the bravado to believe I could return home, stay reasonably sober and fall asleep. Indeed, I did, which impressed me in the morning as a species of small wonder. Be it said, I had gone to bed with a purpose. It was to debate (in the deepest regions of sleep) whether I should try to see Madeleine or not. The readiness with which I took to my bed, and the force with which I slept, were testimony to that purpose.

By morning, there was no question. On this, the Twenty-eighth Day of Patty’s departure, I would go to see Madeleine. All else could wait. I had breakfast and cleaned the dog’s dish, noting that his fear of me had now been replaced by a huge reserve. He had kept his distance this week. Yet before I would allow myself to ponder the withdrawal of his friendship and thereby risk my mood, I picked up the Cape Cod book and found Alvin Luther Regency’s number in the Town of Barnstable.

It was nine o’clock, a good time to call. Regency had probably driven the fifty miles to Provincetown already, or failing that, was on the road.

Nor was I wrong. It was Madeleine on the line. I knew she was alone.

“Hello,” she said. Yes, she was alone. Her voice was clear. When another person was in the room with her, she always betrayed distraction.

I waited, as if to prepare the occasion. Then I said, “I hear you send regards.”

“Tim.”

“Yes, it’s Tim.”

“The man of my life,” she said. It was with an edge of mockery I had not heard for a long time. She could just as easily have said, “Aren’t you the fellow in the short chapter?” Yes, her voice had echoes.

“How are you?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” she said, “but I don’t remember sending you regards.”

“I have it on good authority you did.”

“Yes, it’s Tim,” she said, “oh, my God!” as if now, the second time around, it was reaching her. Yes, Tim—on the phone—after all these years. “No, baby,” she said, “I didn’t send you regards.”

“You’re married, I hear.”

“Yes.”

We had a silence. There was a moment when I could feel the impulse mount in her to hang up, and perspiration started on my neck. All hope for the day would be smashed if she put the receiver down, yet my instinct was not to speak.

“Where are you living?” she asked at last.

“You mean you don’t know?”

“Hey, friend,” she said, “is this Twenty Questions? I don’t know.”

“Please, lady, don’t be harsh.”

“Fuck off. I’m sitting here putting my head together”—that meant I had interrupted her first toke of the morning—“and you ring up like you’re the fellow from yesterday.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, “you don’t know that I’m living in Provincetown?”

“I don’t know anybody there. And from what I hear, I’m not sure that I want to.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Every time the clock chimes, your husband busts another one of your old dealer friends.”

“How about that?” she said. “Isn’t it awful?”

“How could you marry fuzz?”

“Do you have another dime? Try calling collect.” She hung up.

I got into my car.

I had to see her. It was one thing to blow on the embers of an old romance, it was another to feel the promise of an answer. I had at that moment an insight into the root of obsession itself. No wonder we cannot bear questions whose answers are not available. They sit in the brain like the great holes that were dug for the foundations of buildings that never went up. Everything wet, rotten, and dead collects in them. Count the cavities in your teeth by the obsessions that send you back to drink. No question, therefore. I had to see her.

How quickly I took myself through the landscape. It was the day for me. Just outside Provincetown, a wan November sun gave a pale light to the dunes and they looked like the hills of heaven. The wind blew sand until the ridges were obscured by an angelic haze of light, and on the other side of the highway, toward the bay, all the little white cabins for summer tourists were lined up as neatly as kennels on a pedigree-dog compound. Now, with their windows boarded, they had a mute, somewhat injured look, but then, the trees were bare as well and bore a hue as weathered as the hide of animals going through a long winter in a land without forage.

I took my chances and drove at a rate that would have put me in jail if a State Trooper had caught my vehicle on radar. Yet I did not make such fine time, after all, since it occurred to me in the middle of this high speed that Barnstable was a small enough town to notice a man in a Porsche asking directions to Regency’s house, and I did not want a neighbor inquiring of Alvin Luther this evening who the friend might be who parked his sports car three hundred yards away from the door. In this part of the Cape, the winter people, mean and quick-sighted as birds, orderly as clerks, write down license numbers when they don’t recognize your car. They anticipate interlopers. So I parked in Hyannis and rented an anonymous dun-colored blubber-boat, a Galaxy, or was it a Cutlass?—I think a Cutlass, it didn’t matter, I was hyper enough to joke about the ubiquity of our American auto with the young airhead behind the Hertz counter. She must have thought I was on LSD. She certainly took a time checking my credit card and made me wait through one of those ten-minute ready-to-slay delay warps before she put down the phone and gave the card back. That gave me opportunity to brood a bit over my financial condition. Patty Lareine had emptied our checking account when she left, and had cut off my Visa, my MasterCard and my American Express cards, all of which I discovered in the first week. But husbands of my ilk have resources even wives like Patty Lareine cannot eradicate entirely, and so my old Diners Club, which I would renew but never use, had been overlooked by her. Now its viability was keeping me in food, drink, gas, this rented car, and—well, it was near to a month—sooner or later Patty Lareine was going to get a few bills from the outpost. Then, after she cut me off, lack of money might become my preoccupation. I didn’t care. I would sell off the furniture. Money was the game other people played that I tried to avoid by having just enough not to play it. No one ever trusts a man who makes such a claim, but do you know?—I believe myself.

All this is making an excursion from the point, except that the nearer I came to Barnstable, the more my mind was afraid to contemplate what I would do if Madeleine did not let me in. Such uneasiness was, however, soon replaced by the need to concentrate on getting there. That was no automatic deed in these parts. The environs of Barnstable had in the last decade become little more than freshly paved roads and newly erected developments slashed through the flat scrub pine that covered most of the land here. Even old-timers had often not heard of new streets two miles from where they lived. So I took the precaution of stopping at a real estate office in Hyannis where they had a large up-to-date map of the county, and finally located Alvin Luther’s little lane. As I had suspected, it looked, by the map, to be not more than a hundred yards long, one of six similar and parallel mini-streets all depending from a trunk road like six teats on a sow, or, would it be kinder to say, like one of six cylinders on an in-line engine designed for the kind of car I was now driving? Dependably, the short road to his house ended in a nipple the size of an asphalt turnaround. Around that dead-end circle were set out five identical highly modified Cape Cod—type wooden houses, each with a planted pine tree on the lawn, a set of plastic rain gutters, asbestos shingles, differently painted mailboxes, trash-can bins, tricycles on the grass—I parked just short of the circle.

It would certainly attract attention to be seen walking fifty needless steps to her door. I could hardly go up, ring her bell and later make it back to my car without being observed. Yet it would be worse to leave the car in front of another house and in consequence agitate the owner. What a loneliness hung over this enclave in the sorry scrub-pine woods! I thought of old Indian graves that once must have sat on these low brush-filled lands. Of course, Madeleine would accept a situation whose gloom matched her own worst moods—from that she could rise. But to live in a house like Patty’s, where one could plummet below the cheerfulness of the colors—well, not much, for Madeleine, could be worse.

I pressed the doorbell.

It wasn’t until I heard her step that I dared to be certain she was in. She began to tremble as soon as she saw me. The intensity of her disturbance went through me as clearly as if she had spoken. She was delighted, she was furious, but she was not startled. She had put her make-up on, and thereby I knew (for usually she did not do anything to her face until evening) that she was expecting a visitor. Doubtless, it was me.

I received no great greeting, however. “You’re a clod,” she said. “I’d expect you to do something like this.”

“Madeleine, if you didn’t want me to come, you should not have hung up.”

“I called you back. There was no answer.”

“You discovered my name in the book?”

“I discovered her name.” She looked me over. “Being kept doesn’t agree with you,” she told me at the end of this examination.

Madeleine had worked as a hostess for years in a good New York bar and restaurant and she did not like to have her poise nicked. Her trembling had most certainly stopped, but her voice was not where she would have placed it.

“Let me lay the facts of life on you,” she said. “You can stay in my house about five minutes before the neighbors will start phoning each other to find out who you are.” She glanced out the window. “Did you walk here?”

“My car is down the road.”

“Brilliant. I think you better go right away. You’re just asking directions, right?”

“Who are your neighbors that they inspire such respect?”

“There’s a State Trooper’s family to the left, and a retired couple to the right, Mr. and Mrs. Snoop.”

“I thought maybe they were old friends from the Mafia.”

“Well, Madden,” she said, “ten years have gone by, but you still show no class.”

“I want to talk to you.”

“Let’s find a hotel room in Boston,” she said. It was her good way of telling me to go peddle a few papers.

“I’m still in love with you,” I said.

She began to cry. “You’re such a bad guy,” she said. “You really are rotten.”

I wanted to embrace her. I wanted, if the truth be told, to go right back to bed with her, but it was not the hour. That much I had learned in ten years.

Her hand made a little gesture. “Come on in,” she said.

The living room went with the house. It had a cathedral ceiling, factory-prepared paneling, a rug of some synthetic material, and a lot of furniture that must have come from the shopping mall in Hyannis. There was nothing of herself. No surprise. She paid great attention to her body, her clothing, her make-up, her voice and the expressions on her heart-shaped face. She could register with the subtlest turn of her fine mouth every shade of the sardonic, the contemptuous, the mysterious, the tender and the cognizant that she might need to express. She was her own work of brunette art. She presented herself as such. But her surroundings were another matter. When I first met Madeleine she was living in an apartment totally drab. I need only describe Nissen’s place again. That was cool. I had a queen who was independent of her habitat. I can tell you that was one good reason I tired of her over a couple of years. An Italian queen was no easier to live with than a Jewish princess.

Now I said, “Alvin bought all this?”

“Is that your name for him? Alvin?”

“What do you call him?”

“Maybe I call him the winner,” she said.

“It was the winner who told me that you send regards.”

She was hardly quick enough to conceal the news. “I never spoke your name to him,” she said.

I was thinking that could be true. When I knew her she never talked about anyone before me.

“Well,” I said, “how did your husband find out I knew you?”

“Keep trying. You’ll come up with the answer.”

“You think Patty Lareine told him?”

Madeleine shrugged.

“How do you know,” I asked, “that Patty Lareine knows him?”

“Oh, he told me how he met the two of you. Sometimes he tells me a lot. We’re lonesome here.”

“Then you knew I was in Provincetown.”

“I managed to forget it.”

“Why are you lonesome?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“You have two sons to take care of. That must keep you hopping.”

“What are you talking about?”

My instinct was sound. I did not think children lived in this house. “Your husband,” I said, “showed me a photograph of you with two little boys.”

“They’re his brother’s children. I don’t have any. You know I can’t.”

“Why would he lie to me?”

“He’s a liar,” Madeleine said. “What’s the big news? Most cops are.”

“You sound as if you don’t like him.”

“He’s a cruel, overbearing son of a bitch.”

“I see.”

“But I like him.”

“Oh.”

She began to laugh. Then she began to cry. “Excuse me,” she said and stepped into the bathroom that was off the entrance hall. I studied the living room some more. There were no prints or paintings, but on one wall hung about thirty framed photographs of Regency in various uniforms. Green Beret, State Trooper, others I did not recognize. He was shaking hands in some of them with political officials and men who looked like bureaucrats, and there were two fellows that I would have cast for high FBI men. Sometimes Regency was receiving athletic or memorial cups, and sometimes he was giving them away. In the center was one large framed glossy of Madeleine in a velvet gown with deep cleavage. She looked beautiful.

On the facing wall was a gun rack. I do not know enough to say how fine a collection it might be, but there were three shotguns and ten rifles. To one side was a glass case with a steel-mesh front, and within was a pistol rack with two six-shot revolvers and three fat handguns that looked like Magnums to me.

When she still did not come out, I took a quick trip upstairs and passed through the master bedroom and the guest bedroom. There was more shopping-mall furniture. It was all neat. The beds were made. That was not quintessentially characteristic of Madeleine.

In the corner of the mirror was tucked a piece of paper. On it was written:

It was in her handwriting.

I moved downstairs just before she came out again.

“Are you feeling all right?” I asked.

She nodded. She sat in one of the armchairs. I put myself in the other.

“Hello, Tim,” she said.

I didn’t know whether to trust her. How much I needed to talk I was just beginning to realize, but if Madeleine did not prove to be the best person to whom to unburden myself, she would almost certainly be the worst.

I said, “Madeleine, I’m still in love with you.”

“Next case,” she said.

“Why did you marry Regency?”

It was wrong to use his last name. She stiffened as if I had touched her on the marriage itself, but I was already weary of speaking of him as the winner.

“It’s your fault,” she said. “After all, you didn’t have to introduce me to Big Stoop.”

Nor did she have to finish the thought. I knew the words she was inclined to say, and held back. However, she could not hold herself. Her voice came forth in a poor imitation of Patty Lareine. She was too angry. The mimicry was strained. “Yessir,” said Madeleine, “ever since Big Stoop, I’ve had a taste for good old boys with mammoth dicks.”

“You serving any drinks?” I asked.

“It’s time for you to go. I can still pass you off as an insurance salesman.”

“Say, you are afraid of Regency.”

She was not hard to manipulate when all was said. Her pride had to remain intact. She now said, “It’s you he’ll be irritated at.”

I said nothing. I was trying to calculate the size of his anger. “Do you think he’d be bad?”

“Buster, he’s in another league.”

“What does that mean?”

“He can be bad.”

“I’d hate to watch him cut my head off.”

Now she looked startled. “Did he tell you about that?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“Vietnam?”

I nodded.

“Well,” she said, “any man who can behead a Viet Cong with one stroke of a machete is doubtless to be reckoned with.” She was not horrified altogether by such an act. Not altogether. I was remembering the depth of the sense of vengeance in Madeleine. Once or twice a friend had insulted her over what I deemed a small matter. She never forgave it. Yes, an execution in Vietnam could stir up much in her.

“I gather that you’re miserable with Patty Lareine,” Madeleine now said.

“Yes.”

“She left you a month ago?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want her back?”

“I’m afraid of what I’d do.”

“Well, you chose her.” There was a decanter of bourbon on the sideboard, and she now picked it up and came back with two glasses, pouring each of us a half-inch of liquor without water, and no ice. That was a ritual from the past. “Our morning medicine,” we used to call it. As before, so again—she shuddered as she sipped it.

“How the hell could you pick her over me?” was what Madeleine wanted to say. I could hear the words more clearly than if she had uttered them.

That was one question she would never ask aloud, and I was grateful. What could I have replied? Would I have said, “Call it a question of Comparative Fellatio, dear heart. You, Madeleine, used to take a cock into your mouth with a sob, or a sweet groan, as if hell were impending over this. It was as beautiful as the Middle Ages. And Patty Lareine was a cheerleader and ready to gobble you up. Albeit with innate skill. It came down to whether you wished your lady to be demure or insatiable. I chose Patty Lareine. She was as insatiable as good old America, and I wanted my country on my cock.”

Of course, my long-lost medieval lady had now developed a taste for men who could behead you with a blow.

The greatest virtue of living with Madeleine had been the way we could sit in a room together hearing each other’s thoughts so clearly that we seemed to be drawing them from the same well. So she as much as heard my last unsaid speech. I knew that by the mean twist of her mouth. When she looked at me again, Madeleine was full of hatred.

“I didn’t tell Al about you,” she said.

“Is that what you call him?” I said to hold her off. “Al?”

“Shut up,” she said. “I didn’t tell him about you, because there was no need for it. He burned you right out of me. Regency is a stud.”

No woman had ever flayed me with that word so well before. Patty Lareine could not have come close. “Yes,” said Madeleine, “you and me loved each other, but when Mr. Regency and I began our little courtship, he would fuck five times a night, and the fifth was as good as the first. On the best day you’ll ever have, you’ll never come near Mr. Five. That’s what I call him, you dolt.”

Against every intent of my will, there were tears in my eyes from the pain this speech gave me. It was equal to suffering while sand is cleaned out of a wound. Yet, at that moment, I fell in love with her all over again. Her words would show me where I put my feet for the rest of my life. It also stirred a pride I thought was dead. For I took a vow that one night before I was done, I would obliterate her admiration for Mr. Five.

Before I left, however, our conversation took another turn. We sat in silence for a time, and then it was longer than that. Maybe it was half an hour later that the tears began to come out of her eyes and wash away the mascara. After a while she had to wipe her face.

“Tim, I want you to go,” she said.

“All right. I’ll be back.”

“Call first.”

“Okay.”

She walked me to the door. Then she stopped and said, “There’s one thing more I ought to tell you.” She nodded to herself. “But if I do,” she went on, “you’ll want to stay and talk.”

“I promise not to.”

“No, you’ll break your word.” She said, “Wait. Wait here,” and she went to a shopping-mall replica of a Colonial kneehole desk in the living room, where she wrote a few words on a note, sealed it and came back.

“This promise you can keep,” she said. “I want you to hold this note until you’re better than halfway home. Then, open it. Think about it. Don’t ring me to talk about it. I’m telling you what I know. Don’t ask how I know.”

“That’s six promises,” I said.

“Mr. Six,” she said, and came close, and gave her mouth to me. It was one of the most remarkable kisses I have ever had, and yet there was little passion in it. All the tenderness of her heart, however, and all her pall of rage both passed into me, and I confess that I was stunned by the combination, as if a good boxer had just caught me with a startling left hook and a stultifying right, which is not the way to describe a kiss and gives none of the balm it also offered my heart, but I say this to emphasize how rubbery were my legs on the walk past the neighbors down the road to my car.

I kept the six promises and didn’t open her note until long after I turned in the blubber-wagon at Hyannis and got back into my Porsche and drove all the way to Eastham. There I stopped on the highway to peruse her message, and it took three seconds. I didn’t phone her, I just read the note again. It said: “My husband is having an affair with your wife. Let’s not talk about it unless you’re prepared to kill them.”

Well, I started up my Porsche again, but it will come as small surprise that I was not able to concentrate on the road, and coming to a sign for the Marconi Beach Site of the National Park Service, I turned off Route 6 and drove out to the bluffs overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. I left my wheels in the space allotted by the Park Service and walked off to sit on the top of a low dune, passing sand through my hands while I meditated on the Pilgrims and wondered if it might be out in the seas right here that they turned north to sail up the tip of the Cape and around to Provincetown. What better place than this promontory for Marconi to send his early wireless messages across the ocean’s space? My mind, however, on pondering such large concepts, grew empty, and I sighed, and thought of other wireless messages that had gone between Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais, Elizabeth and Essex, the Czarina and Rasputin, and in our own most reduced and modest way, Madeleine and myself. I sat at the top of this low bluff and passed sand back and forth in my hands and tried to estimate my situation now that I had seen Madeleine. Did it all come down to Alvin Luther Regency?

It occurred to me that I could just about use a rifle and had hardly any competence with my pistol. For that matter, I had not had a fist fight in five years. With drinking, and, of late, my smoking, I must have a liver large enough for two. Yet at the thought of facing Regency, I also felt some of the old blood come back. I did not start as a fighter, and I did not seem to have ended as one, but the years in the middle when I tended bar taught me a few tactics, which knowledge I had doubled in the slammer—I was a compendium of dirty tricks—and then finally, it didn’t matter. I had gotten so evil in my last few street fights that they always had to pull me off. Something of my father’s blood had passed on to me, and I seemed to have bought his code. Tough guys don’t dance.

Tough guys don’t dance. On that curious proposition my memory, like a boat coming around a buoy into harbor, returned to my adolescence and I could feel myself dwelling again in the year I turned sixteen and went into the Golden Gloves. That was far away from where I now found myself with Madeleine’s note. Or was it not so far? After all, it was in the Golden Gloves that I tried for the first time to hurt someone seriously, and sitting here, on the beach at South Wellfleet, I started to smile. For I was able to see myself in the way I used to, and at sixteen, I always pictured myself as tough. I had, after all, the toughest father on the block. While I knew, even then, that I would never be his equal, still I told myself that I was enough like him to make my high school football varsity by my sophomore year. That was a feat! And I remember how that winter, once football was over, I used to feel a mean and proud hostility toward the world which I could hardly control. (It was the year of my parents’ divorce.) I started to go to a boxing gym near my father’s bar. It was inevitable. Being Dougy Madden’s son, I had to sign up for the Golden Gloves.

A Jewish boy I knew at Exeter told me that the year before he turned thirteen was the worst in his life. He spent it getting ready for his Bar Mitzvah, and never knew if on a given night he could fall asleep or would be wide awake reciting the speech he had to give next winter in the synagogue to two hundred friends of his family.

That wasn’t as bad, I suggested to him, as your first night in the Gloves. “For one thing,” I said, “you walk in half naked, and nobody has prepared you for that. Five hundred people are there. Some of them don’t like you. They’re for the other guy. They’re very critical when they stare at you. Then you see your opponent. He looks like dynamite.”

“What made you do it?” my friend asked.

I told him the truth. “I wanted to make my father happy.”

For a boy with such a good purpose, I had, all the same, a nervous stomach in the dressing room. (I was sharing it with fifteen other fighters.) They, like me, were to be in the blue corner. On the other side of a partition was a dressing room with fifteen contenders from the red corner. Every ten minutes or so, one of us on each side would go out to the auditorium and another would come back. There is nothing like the danger of humiliation to build fast alliances. We didn’t know each other, but we kept wishing each guy luck. Devoutly. Every ten minutes, as I say, one kid would go out, and soon after, the previous kid would return. He would be ecstatic if he won, and in misery if he lost, but at least it was over. One kid was carried in, and they sent for an ambulance. He had been knocked out by a black puncher with a big rep. In that minute I considered forfeiting my match. Only the thought of my father sitting in the first row kept me from speaking up. “Okay, Dad,” I said to myself, “my death is for you.”

Once the fight started, I discovered that boxing, like other cultures, takes years to acquire, and, immediately, I lost the little culture I had. I was so scared I never stopped throwing punches. My opponent, who was fat and black, was just as frightened and never stopped either. At the bell, neither of us could move. My heart felt ready to explode. By the second round, we could not do a thing. We stood still, we glowered, we used our heads to block punches because we were too tired to duck—it cost less to get hit than to move. We must have looked like longshoremen too drunk to fight. Both of us were bleeding from the nose and I could smell his blood. I learned on this night that blood has a scent as intimate as body odor. It was an horrendous round. When I got to my corner, I felt equal to an overraced engine whose parts were ready to seize.

“You got to do better, or we don’t win,” said the trainer. He was a friend of my father’s.

When I could catch my voice, I said as formally as I could—you would have thought I was already in prep school—“If you want to terminate the fight, I will abide by that.”

The look in his eye, however, told me he would repeat my remark for the rest of his life.

“Kid, just go beat the shit out of him,” my trainer said.

The bell rang. He gave me my mouthpiece and a shove toward the center of the ring.

Now I fought with desperation. I had to eat the entrails of my remark. My father was shouting so loudly, I even thought I was going to win. Boom! I ran into a bomb. The side of my head could just as well have stopped the full swing of a baseball bat. I suppose that I careened around the ring because I only saw the other boxer in jump cuts. I was in one place, then I was in the next place.

New adrenaline must have been shaken loose by the punch. My legs were shocked full of life. I began to circle and to jab. I ran and I ducked and I jabbed (which is what I should have done from the beginning). At last I could recognize the given: my opponent knew less about boxing than me! Just as I was measuring him for a hook (since I had now discovered that he lowered his right each time I feinted with my left to the belly) why, the bell rang. Fight was over. They lifted his hand.

Afterward, when the well-wishers were gone and I was sitting alone with my father in a coffee shop, a second wave of pain just commencing, Big Mac muttered, “You should have won.”

“I thought I did. Everybody says I did.”

“That’s friends.” He shook his head. “You lost it in the last round.”

No, now that it was over and I had lost, I thought I had won. “Everybody said it was beautiful the way I took that punch and kept moving.”

“Friends.” He said it in so lugubrious a voice that you would have thought it was friends, not drink, that was the bane of the Irish.

I never felt more argumentative with my father. There is no surliness like sitting around, half dislodged in every vale of your mind, torso and limbs, your organs hot and full of lead, your heart loaded with consternation that maybe you did lose the fight your friends say was stolen from you. So I said out of my own puffed mouth, and I probably never sounded cockier to him, “My mistake was that I didn’t dance. I should have come out fast at the bell and stuck him. I should have gone: Stick! Stick! Slide,” I said, moving my hands, “and circled away. Then back with the jab, dance out of range, circle and dance, stick him! Stick him!” I nodded at this fine war plan. “When he was ready, I could have dropped the bum.”

My father’s face was without expression. “Do you remember Frank Costello?” he asked.

“Top of the mob,” I said with admiration.

“One night Frank Costello was sitting in a night club with his blonde, a nice broad, and at the table he’s also got Rocky Marciano, Tony Canzoneri and Two-ton Tony Galento. It’s a guinea party,” my father said. “The orchestra is playing. So Frank says to Galento, ‘Hey, Two-ton, I want you to dance with Gloria.’ That makes Galento nervous. Who wants to dance with the big man’s girl? What if she likes him? ‘Hey, Mr. Costello,’ says Two-ton Tony, ‘you know I’m no dancer.’ ‘Put down your beer,’ says Frank, ‘and get out there and move. You’ll be very good.’ So Two-ton Tony gets up and trots Gloria around the floor at arm’s length, and when he comes back, Costello tells the same thing to Canzoneri, and he has to take Gloria out. Then it’s Rocky’s turn. Marciano believes he’s big enough in his own right to call Costello by his first name, so he says, ‘Mr. Frank, we heavyweights are not much on a ballroom floor.’ ‘Go do some footwork,’ says Costello. While Rocky is out there, Gloria takes the occasion to whisper in his ear, ‘Champ, do me a favor. See if you can get Uncle Frank to do a step with me.’

“Well, when the number is over, Rocky leads her back. He’s feeling better and the others got their nerve up too. They start to rib the big man, very careful, you understand, just a little tasteful chaffing. ‘Hey, Mr. Costello,’ they say, ‘Mr. C., come on, why don’t you give your lady a dance?’

“ ‘Will you,’ Gloria asks, ‘please!’

“ ‘It’s your turn, Mr. Frank,’ they say.

“Costello,” my father told me, “shakes his head. ‘Tough guys,’ he says, ‘don’t dance.’ ”

Now, my father had about five such remarks and he never dropped them on you until he did. “Inter faeces et urinam nascimur” became the last and the unhappiest, even as “Don’t talk—you’ll spill the wind out of the sails” was always the happiest, but through my adolescence, it used to be: “Tough guys don’t dance.”

At sixteen, a half-Mick from Long Island, I did not know about Zen masters and their koans, but if I had, I would have said the remark was a koan, since I didn’t understand it, yet it stayed with me, and the older I became, the more meaning it offered, until now, sitting on a beach at South Wellfleet, looking out at the surf that came to me at the end of the three-thousand-mile ride of the waves, I thought again of the wonders of erosion that Patty Lareine had worked on my character. The wells of self-pity rose predictably, and I thought it was time to stop thinking of my koan unless I could bring a new thought to the circle.

Surely my father had meant something finer than that you held your ground when there was trouble, something finer that doubtless he could not or would not express, but it was there, his code. It could be no less than a vow. Did I miss some elusive principle on which his philosophy must crystallize?

It was then that I saw a man approaching on the beach. The closer he came, the nearer I came to recognizing him, and with that, many of my preoccupations with myself began to fade.

He was a tall man but not menacing in appearance. In truth, he was plump, and soon in danger of looking like a pear, for at any weight he would have had a potbelly and not much in the way of shoulders. Moreover, his gait as he walked on the sand was comic. He was well-dressed, in a three-piece pin-stripe charcoal-gray flannel suit with a white collar on a striped shirt, a club tie, a small red handkerchief in his breast pocket, and a camel’s-hair coat folded on his arm. To avoid scuffing his brown loafers, he was carrying them in his hand, and so marching in argyle socks over the cold November sand. That gave him the prancing, skittery foot of a show horse stepping over wet cobblestones.

“How are you, Tim?” the man now said to me.

“Wardley!” I was twice stupefied. Once, because he had put on so much weight—he was slim when I saw him last in divorce court—and again, that we should meet on this beach at South Wellfleet I had not visited in five years.

Wardley leaned over and stuck out his hand in the general direction of where I was sitting.

“Tim,” he said, “you were a perfect son of a bitch in the way you acted, but I want you to know, I don’t sit on bad feelings. Life, as one’s friends constantly admonish, is too short for that.”

I shook his hand. If he was willing, I did not see how I could refuse. After all, his wife had run across me dead broke in a bar in Tampa—it was the first time she had seen me in close to five years—had given me a job as their chauffeur, had taken me to her bed under his nose, thereby resuming the romantic possibilities we had begun on our night in North Carolina, and had then motivated me to the point where I certainly tried to think up a fail-safe method to kill him. That failing to spark, I certainly did testify against him in the divorce trial, taking the stand to swear—and some of it happened to be true—that he had solicited me to testify against her for a very good sum. I had added that he proposed I take Patty Lareine to a house in Key West that he was prepared to raid with a detective and a photographer. That was not wholly true. He had merely mused aloud over such a possibility. I also said that he had asked me to seduce her with the aim of becoming a witness for him, and that was successful perjury. It is possible my testimony did as much for Patty Lareine as her lawyer with his video coaching. Wardley’s legal guns certainly treated me like a star witness and did their best to paint me as an ex-con and a beach bum. They were as nasty as you would expect, but how could I keep any kind of good conscience about my role? Through all of that gig as a chauffeur in his home, Wardley had treated me as an Exeter classmate down on his luck. It had been no way to treat him back.

“Yes,” he said, “I was hurt for a little while, but Meeks always said to me, ‘Wardley, extirpate self-pity. It’s one emotion this family can’t afford.’ I hope they’re dipping Meeks now in the worst pits, but that’s neither here nor there. One must take one’s advice where one can find it.”

He had the damnedest voice. I will come to describe it in a moment, but for now, his face was over me. Like many ungainly people, he had a habit, when speaking to someone who was seated, of leaning forward from the waist and putting his mug into the air space around your own, so that you were always uneasy you’d receive the dew of his patrician spit. With the sun on his face he looked, particularly at this short distance, like a dollop of oatmeal. He would have been oafish in appearance if he weren’t so neat, for his thin dark hair was straight, and his features, left to themselves, were lumpy, lacking in strength and sullen, but the eyes were startling. They were luminous, and had the curious gift of goggling into a blaze at a passing remark as if the devil had just rammed a thumb up Wardley’s track.

So his eyes did their best to own you, staring into your face as if you were the first soul he had ever found remotely like his own.

Then there was his voice. My father would have hated it. God certainly used Wardley’s voice to display His decency. Whatever Wardley lacked in any other way was made up for by his diphthongs. A snob would turn to cream before those diphthongs.

If I have taken a while to describe my old classmate, it is because I was still in shock. I had long been a believer in the far reach of coincidence; indeed, I went so far as to think one must always expect it when extraordinary or evil events occur—a bizarre but forceful notion I hope to explain. That Wardley, however, should choose to appear on this beach now—well, I would have been happier at first with a rational explanation.

“It’s incredible that you’re here,” I said despite myself.

He nodded. “I have absolute faith in chance meetings. If I had a saint, her name would be Serendipity.”

“You seem glad to see me.”

He considered this, his eyes intent on mine. “Do you know,” he said, “everything considered, I think I am.”

“Wardley, you have a good nature. Please sit down.”

He complied, which was a relief. Now, I did not have to look constantly into his eyes. His thigh, however, which had ballooned up as much as the rest of him, rested against mine, a large soft amiable physical object. The truth is that if one had a vocation in that direction, one could have grabbed him, etc. His flesh had the kind of nubile passivity that begged to be abused. In prison, I remembered now, they used to call him “the Duke of Windsor.” I used to hear cons say of Wardley, “Oh, the Duke of Windsor. He’s got an asshole as big as a bucket.”

“You don’t look well,” Wardley now murmured.

I let this pass, and took my turn to ask, “How long have you been in these parts?” I could have meant this Marconi Beach, South Wellfleet, the Cape, New England, or for that matter, all of New York and Philadelphia too, but he just waved his hand. “Let’s talk,” he said, “about vital matters.”

“That’s easier.”

“Easier, Mac, you’re right. I’ve always said—in fact, I used to say it to Patty Lareine, ‘Tim has an instinctive gift for good manners. Just like you, he tells it as it is. But he puts the best face on the matter.’ I was trying to smuggle a clue, of course, into her obdurate head. How I tried to give her a notion of how to behave.” He laughed. It was with the great pleasure exhibited by people who have spent their lives laughing aloud when they are by themselves, and so, if there was much loneliness in it, there was also extraordinary individuality, as if he didn’t care how much was revealed of the most godawful sinks and traps in his plumbing. The liberty of being absolutely himself was worth the rest.

When he had finished this laugh, and I had begun to wonder what was amusing him so, he said, “Since you, me and Patty have been down this road before, let me make it brief. What would you think of doing her in?”

He said it with a gleam, as if proposing the theft of the Koh-i-noor diamond.

“Total?”

“Of course.”

“You don’t take long to get to the point.”

“That’s the other piece of advice I received from my father. He told me, ‘The more important the matter, the quicker you must broach it. Otherwise, the importance itself will weigh on you. Then you’ll never get it proposed.’ ”

“Maybe your father was right.”

“Of course.”

He was obviously leaving the option to pursue this suggestion entirely to me.

“I’m inclined to ask,” I said. “How much?”

“How much do you want?”

“Patty Lareine used to promise me the moon,” I said. “ ‘Just get rid of that awful faggot,’ she’d say, ‘and you’ll have half of all I’ll be worth.’ ” I said this to be as rude to him as I could. His compliment about my good manners had irritated me. It was so blatant in its stroking. So I said this to see if his wounds had dried. I’m not so certain they had. He blinked rapidly, as though to keep a few emotional paces in front of any loose tears, and said, “Well, I wonder if she now has equally agreeable things to say about you.”

I began to laugh. I had to. I had always assumed that when we were done, Patty Lareine would be kinder to me than she had been to Wardley, but that might be a large supposition.

“Are you in her will?” he asked.

“I have no idea.”

“Do you hate her enough to do the job?”

“Five times over.”

I said it without pause. Talking on the beach gave a great freedom to say anything. But then the number came back. Had I uttered a true sentiment, or was it merely a repetition of the noxious idea that Madeleine Falco Regency’s husband ejaculated five times a night inside that temple I had once adored. Like a boxer, I only seemed to ache hours after the ugly exchanges had taken place.

“I’ve heard,” Wardley said, “that Patty treated you badly.”

“Well,” I said, “you could use the word.”

“You look whipped. I don’t believe you could perform the deed.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

“I don’t want to be.”

“Why don’t you commit it?” I asked.

“Tim, you’ll never believe me.”

“Tell me anyway. Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies.”

“That’s a good remark.”

“It’s not mine. It’s Leon Trotsky’s.”

“Oh. It’s worthy of Ronald Firbank.”

“Where is Patty Lareine now?” I asked.

“She’s around. You can count on that.”

“How do you know?”

“She and I are vying for the same piece of property.”

“Are you trying to slay her or defeat her in a business deal?”

“Whichever comes first,” he said with a droll flash of the whites of his eyes. Could he be trying to emulate William F. Buckley, Jr.?

“But you would rather see her dead?” I persisted.

“Not by my own hand.”

“Why not?”

“You simply won’t believe me. I want her to look into the eyes of her killer and have it all wrong. I don’t want her to see me as the last thing in her life and say, ‘Oh, well, it’s Wardley going in for pay-back.’ That’s too easy. It’ll give her peace. She’ll know who to haunt as soon as she gets her stuff together in the next place. And I’m not hard to find. Believe me, I prefer her to die in a state of profound confusion. ‘How could Tim have done it?’ she’ll ask herself. Did I underestimate him?’ ”

“You’re marvelous.”

“Well,” he said, “I knew you wouldn’t comprehend me. But you hardly can, considering the gap in our backgrounds.”

He had turned around sufficiently so that his eyes were looking into mine again. On top of it all, his breath was not too fragrant.

“But if you scotch her in the real estate deal,” I said, “she’ll know it’s you paying her back.”

“Yes, she will. I want that. I want my living enemies to see my expression. I desire them to know on every breath they take that, yes, yes, it’s Wardley who did this to them. Death is different. Send them out in confusion, I say.”

I would have been less inclined to take him seriously if, in prison, he had not had a man killed who was threatening him. I was present when he bought the killer’s services, and he had not sounded all that different from now. Convicts would laugh at him, but not to his face.

“Tell me about the real estate deal,” I said.

“Since your wife and I have an eye on the same place, I’m not certain I should tell you. One never knows when Patty Lareine will come back and wrap her arms around you.”

“Yes,” I said, “I could be vulnerable,” and wondered how Patty would reek of Acting Police Chief Regency.

“I shouldn’t tell you.” He paused, then he said, “On impulse, however, I will.”

I had to look now into those abominably large, searching eyes. “I don’t want to roil your feelings, Tim, but I’m not certain you truly understood Patty Lareine. She pretends that she couldn’t care less what the world thinks of her, but I will tell you that she’s really the stuff from which the world’s flagships are made. It’s just that she’s too proud to work her way up the daily rungs. So she pretends no interest.”

I was thinking of the first gathering to which I had taken Patty Lareine when we came to Provincetown five years ago. Some friends of mine brought their wineskins out to the dunes for a party, and the women contributed tea-cakes and Acapulco Gold, Jamaica Prime, and even a few Thai sticks. We had a moon blast. Patty had actually been nervous before it began—I was to learn that she was always nervous before a party—which might have been hard to comprehend considering how good she was at giving them, but then, Dylan Thomas, they say, used to throw up just before going out to give an unforgettable poetry reading. So had Patty taken them for a great ride on this first party, and before the end, even bent over to play a bugle between her legs. Yes, she had been the life of that party and many another.

All the same, I knew what he meant. She gave so much for so little. Often I felt the wistful note of a good artist painting ashtrays to make Christmas gifts. So I did not ignore what he said; indeed, I considered whether he could be right. Her unrest at living in Provincetown had become considerable of late.

“The secret to Patty Lareine,” Wardley said, “is that she sees herself as a sinner. Hopelessly lost. No return. What can a girl do next?”

“Drink herself to death.”

“Only if she’s a fool. I would say the practical answer for Patty Lareine is to build great works to the devil.”

His wait was portentous, as if to allow endless space for this to sink in. “I’ve kept my eye on her,” he said. “There is little she has done in the last five years I haven’t heard about.”

“You have friends in town?”

He made a gesture with his hands.

Of course he did. With half the winter population on welfare, he would not have to pay a great deal for information.

“I’ve kept in touch,” he said, “with real estate agents. Haunted the tip of the Cape in my own way. Provincetown impresses me. It’s the most attractive fishing village on the Eastern seaboard, and if not for the Portuguese, bless them, it would have been ruined long ago.”

“Are you saying Patty Lareine wants to get into real estate?”

“Not at all. She wants to pull off a coup. She has her eye on a fabulous house on a hill in the West End.”

“I think I know the place you mean.”

“Of course you do. Don’t I know that! Those people you had drinks with at The Widow’s Walk were my surrogates. They were planning to step into the agent’s office next day to get that house you were already kind enough to put me in.” He whistled. “Provincetown is haunted. I’m convinced of it. How else could you come up with my name while speaking to them.”

“It is remarkable.”

“It is directly spooky.”

I nodded. My scalp felt alert. Did Patty Lareine tune the orchestra in Hell-Town? While blowing her bugle at the moon?

“Do you realize,” said Wardley, “that poor Lonnie Pangborn got up the same night in the middle of dinner with his blonde lalapalooza, and phoned me? He was half convinced I was double-dealing. How, he asked, could he keep a low profile as the purchaser when my name was being bruited about?”

“Well, chalk one up,” I said.

“That always happens with master plans,” said Wardley. “The better the plan, the more you may count on something unforeseen getting in to bend the works. Someday I’ll tell you the real story of how Jack Kennedy got killed. It was supposed to be a miss! What a set of accidents! The CIA didn’t know anus from appetite that day.”

“You want to buy the estate in order to keep Patty Lareine from getting it?”

“Exactly.”

“What would you do with it?”

“I would take great pleasure in hiring a caretaker to watch over its empty glories. Calculated to put dry rot into every one of Patty Lareine’s apertures.”

“But what better can she do, if she gets it?”

He held up a white plump hand. “This is just my speculation.”

“Yes.”

“Newport is Newport, and you can leave it where it is. Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket have become no better than real estate. The Hamptons are a disaster! Le Frak City is more attractive on Sunday.”

“Provincetown is jammed worse than any of them.”

“Yes, in summer it’s hopeless, but then, so are all the other spots on the Eastern seaboard. The point is, Provincetown has natural beauty. The others are nature’s culls. And for fall, winter and spring, nothing is superior to little old P-town. I suspect that Patty Lareine wants to start a chic hotel right there on that estate. Done properly, it could, in a few years, have more cachet than anything around. In the off-season, once in, it could sweep all before it. That’s how Patty is thinking, I reckon. And, with proper assistants, she would make a fabulous hotelier. Tim, whether I’m right or wrong, I know this. She’s got her heart set on the place.” He sighed. “Now that Lonnie’s packed it in and the blonde has disappeared, I’ve got to find a representative in a hurry or go speak for myself. That will kick the price way up.”

I began to laugh. “You’ve convinced me,” I said. “You’d rather screw Patty on a piece of real estate than kill her.”

“You bet.” He made his point of laughing with me. I didn’t know what to believe. His story sounded wrong.

We watched the waves for a while.

“I adored Patty Lareine,” he said. “I don’t want to bring out the crying towel, but for a little while, she made me feel like a man. I always say that if you’re AC-DC, it’s nice to have power in both lines.”

I smiled.

“Well, it was no laughing matter. All my life, I would remind you, I’ve been trying to regain property rights to my rectum.”

“Given up?”

“I’m the only one who would care what the answer is by now.”

“Back in my chauffeuring days, Patty Lareine used to harangue me on how we had to off you, Wardley. She would say that there would be no peace until you were dead. That if we didn’t kill you, you would certainly kill us. She said she’d known some evil types in her day, but you were the most vindictive. You had, she said, so much time to plot and scheme.”

“Did you believe her?”

“No, not really. I kept thinking of the day we got kicked out of school together.”

“Is that why you didn’t try to terminate me? I always wondered. Because, you know, I didn’t suspect a thing. I always trusted you.”

“Wardley, you have to see my situation. I was broke. I had a police record and couldn’t work any good places as a bartender, and the wealthiest woman I ever knew acted as if she was mad about me, and promised me all the drugs and booze and toys that money could buy. I did get pretty serious about how I was going to total you. Psyched myself up. But I couldn’t get that heavy shit to flush. Know why?”

“Of course not. I’m asking.”

“Because, Wardley, I kept thinking of the time you got your moxie together and inched out along a third-floor ledge to get into your father’s room. That story moved me. You were one wimp who got his nerve up. Finally, I had to call it off. You can choose not to believe me.”

He laughed, and then he laughed again. The sound of his humor as it cawed through his bends brought a flight of sea gulls near, much as if he were the lead bird crying out, “Here’s food, here’s food!”

“That’s marvelous,” he said. “Patty Lareine’s plans gone kerflooie because you didn’t have the heart to kill the little boy on the ledge. Well, I’ve enjoyed this talk and am delighted that as old classmates we are finally getting to know one another. Let me fill you in on what a liar I used to be. I never inched out along that ledge. I made up the tale. Everybody has to have a war story in prison, so that became mine. I wanted people to recognize that I was too desperate to fool around with. But the truth is that I gained entry to my father’s private library by way of the butler—who was also the photographer, remember? He just took out his key and let me in. And all for no more than the promise that I would unbutton his fly—old-fashioned buttons for the butler, not zippers!—and go gooey-gooey down there. Which I did. I always pay my debts. Paris is well worth a Mass!”

With that he stood up, lifted his shoes on high as if he were the Statue of Liberty, and started off. When he was ten feet away, he turned around and said, “Who knows when Patty Lareine may pop in on you? If you get the impulse, off her. Her head, since we have to put a figure on it, is worth two million and change.” Then he lowered the arm that was carrying the shoes and pranced off on stiff cold feet.

He was not out of earshot before I told myself that if I could find the blonde head that had now disappeared, that very blonde head which probably belonged to Jessica Pond, it might, by now, be sufficiently decomposed to be successfully presented as the remains of Patty Lareine. I might be the lucky inheritor of a high-powered scam. Tricky as hell, but worth two million.

Then I told myself: Anyone who is capable of thinking this way is capable of homicide.

Then I told myself: Thought is cheap. The best guide to my innocence is that the idea of such a scam hardly stirs me.

I waited until Meeks Wardley Hilby III was a distance down the beach before I went back to my Porsche, and left Marconi Beach for the drive to Provincetown.

On the way home I learned a little more about the tarnished nature, on occasion, of coincidence.

It seemed to me that I was being followed. I could not swear to this because I could not locate a car behind me. When I would speed, no vehicle came rushing up to keep me in sight. Even as I might sometimes sense, however, who was on the telephone before I picked it up, so now I could not relinquish the conviction that somebody was on my tail. They might be keeping a good distance, but they were following. Had a beeper been put on my Porsche?

I turned right down a side road for a hundred yards and parked. No other car came along. I got out and looked in the front trunk, and at the motor in the rear. Under the back bumper I found a small black box, half the size of a pack of cigarettes, held in place by a magnet.

The black box made no noise and offered no ticking. It felt inert in my hand. I could not be certain what it was. I replaced it, therefore, on the bumper, went back to Route 6, and drove for another mile. Then I parked at the summit of a long straightaway. I kept a pair of field glasses in the side pocket for watching gulls and I scanned the highway with them. There, behind me, just within the useful range of these binoculars, was a brown van also parked on the shoulder. Had they stopped when I did? Were they waiting for me to start up again? I kept driving until I came to Pamet Road in Truro, which went east from the highway for a mile, then north for a mile, then back west to join the four-lane. Three quarters of the way around I stopped at a turn where I could see much of the southern arm of Pamet Road on the other side of the Pamet River Valley, and again the brown vehicle had halted. I had seen this closed brown van before, I knew it!

I parked my car by a house and stepped back into the woods. Whoever was in the van waited another ten minutes but then must have concluded that I was visiting someone, so they drove by to look at the house before which my Porsche was parked, then turned around to go back from where they had come. I listened to the motor, which was not hard to follow. Our roads are empty in winter. It was the only sound in the valley.

Now they stopped again, perhaps three hundred yards away. They would wait for me to start up. The beeper would tell them when I began to move.

I was inclined, what with all natural sense of outrage, to throw their gadget right into the woods—or, better, leave it on some parked car and oblige my followers to wait on Pamet Road for the rest of the night. But I was too furious for that. It offended me that the exceptional meeting of Wardley and myself on Marconi Beach came down to no more than using a beeper to follow my Porsche. Apparently the first precept to recollect was that not all coincidence was diabolical or divine. I was back with the common people!

After all, it was not Wardley I had seen behind the wheel of the van, but Spider Nissen, and Stoodie was in the bucket seat beside him. Wardley was doubtless reading Ronald Firbank in some country inn with a CB radio at his side waiting for Spider and Stoodie to send the word.

Yes, I would keep the beeper, I told myself. Maybe I could use it to good purpose when the opportunity arose. That, however, was only a small satisfaction, considering how much unrest this little machine aroused in my blood, but I could now recognize that the more events began to impinge on me, the closer I could come to the first cause.